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New Scientist Live

Final demands: We explore sci-fi’s unworldly money troubles

Humanity may struggle to meet the costs of the futures featured in our round-up of recent science fiction books by Abigail Nussbaum

One tower fights gentrification

Jon Shireman/Getty

By Abigail Nussbaum

In his long and varied career, Kim Stanley Robinson has produced work characterised by a fascination with systems: political, social, technological and environmental. Whether writing about the terraforming of Mars or government efforts to stave off climate change, Robinson’s chief concern is the effect people have on their environment and the way the environment, in turn, shapes them.

In his recent work, Robinson has been inspired by the early modernist writer John Dos Passos to combine the stories of individual characters with bird’s-eye views of the systems within which they move, as well as newspaper clippings, technical descriptions, lists, history lessons and quotations.

New York 2140, the third novel written in this style, falls in its tone somewhere between the freewheeling, grand tour of a terraformed solar system of 2312 (2012) and the bleak, claustrophobic journey of a doomed generation starship in Aurora (2015). It is also one of Robinson’s most blatantly political novels, concerned not just with climate change, but also with the current state of US politics and finance, and the interactions between these three forces.

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Set in a future in which catastrophic sea-level rise has decimated most of the world’s coastal cities, New York 2140 posits that the unique geographical traits of New York City (as well as the unique traits of its population) have allowed it to survive, albeit in a drastically altered form. Though downtown has been lost to the water, midtown survives as a high-tech Venice, with office buildings converted into gigantic, self-sufficient residential centres. The novel’s characters are residents, staff and squatters in one such building, the MetLife Tower on Madison Square, which is run as a sort of cooperative, producing its own food and power as well as providing shelter.

Post-crisis gentrification

As the novel begins, the immediate crisis of economic depression, food shortages and social upheaval sparked by the rise of sea levels is several decades in the past, and the forces of the finance industry are beginning to inch their way back into midtown, hoping to monetise the cooperative, quasi-socialist community that has arisen there. It’s left to the novel’s characters to fight back against this new form of gentrification, perhaps sparking a political revolution along the way.

Interspersed with this story are passages about the city’s history, actual and fictional, and discussions of the role of finance, both in spurring on the effects of climate change, and in encouraging the city’s regrowth. The core question of New York 2140 is thus the core question of the city itself. Is New York a centre of popular innovation onto which the finance industry has latched itself like a limpet? Or is it a city of finance that tolerates the artistic, technological and social innovations that emerge within it as a sort of adornment?

The answers the novel gives to this question are multifaceted. For a long while, it isn’t clear whether we should view the city’s survival in its altered environment as a testament to the endurance of the human spirit or a sad commentary on capitalism’s endless capacity to propagate itself.

Near its end, however, the book veers quite decidedly towards wish fulfilment. This is particularly true in its depiction of the officers of the NYPD, who are shown as level-headed, devoted to keeping the peace even in the face of unruly rioters and decidedly on the side of the have-nots. Combined with the near-invisibility of non-white communities – historically the most vulnerable to environmental and financial upheavals – it’s a reminder that there are blind spots to Robinson’s, and the book’s, leftism.

Nevertheless, New York 2140‘s vision of the future is so engaging, and so convincing as both a cautionary tale and a promise of hope, that one can’t help but feel invigorated when turning the last page, galvanised to prevent the worst aspects of the novel’s future, and to fight for the best ones.

Greatest hits

A new book by Gwyneth Jones – the first since her novel Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant in 2008 (though she has published short stories and a collection in the intervening years) – is an event. So Tor.com is to be commended for returning Jones, one of our most important and challenging science fiction writers, to centre stage.

Fittingly, after so long an absence, Proof of Concept feels a bit like Jones’s greatest hits. Like much of her work, it is a book about scientists, and about prickly, misunderstood women. As in Spirit, and Jones’s earlier Aleutian trilogy (1991-1997), the driving concept here is the idea of “information space”, a quantum theory-based, faster-than-light travel that is really a sort of mental trick. Among its limitations is the traveller’s inability to determine where they’re actually going: a puzzle the story’s characters are trying to solve.

For our hero, Kir, finding a solution is urgent: she’s on a world desperate for an “escape ticket” (though Kir herself views this desire with derision). Kir’s mentor, Margarethe, has secured funding for Kir’s research by agreeing to pair her up with an experiment intended to simulate conditions during a long interstellar voyage. In reality, the mission functions as this degraded, failing world’s equivalent of reality TV, complete with manufactured crises and interpersonal tensions. Adding to Kir’s discomfort is the fact that Altair, the quantum computer taking up part of her brain, has begun talking to her, and hinting that all is not right with the mission.

There are, in short, a lot of balls being juggled in Proof of Concept, and the novella ends up feeling more like a demonstration of Jones’s abilities, and of the richness of her ideas, than a complete work. That reminder however, was long overdue, and very welcome.